Between the imaginary and the real: photographic portraits of mourning and of melancholia in Argentina

During Argentina's 'Dirty War' (1976-83), the military regime attempted to erase an entire population; today the photographs of the dead/missing stand in defiance, contradicting that attempted erasure of the desaparecidos. In this essay, I explain the connection between photography and loss, and how photography fits within Lacan's understanding of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real, and the 'gaze'. I discuss complicated mourning (circumstances which inhibit/delay mourning) and the difficulties created by political disappearances: as long as the family members maintain the belief that their loved one(s) might still be alive, they cannot begin the process of mourning the permanently lost object. Beginning with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and, using the web-based art exhibits of Marcelo Brodsky and Inés Ulanovsky, I analyze the role of the photograph in Argentina, how it serves as a linking object, how it is used to symbolize the dead/missing, and how it can function to facilitate mourning, or to serve as proof of pathological melancholia. I argue that such artistic representations of loss function to reinscribe healthy mourning rituals within the Argentine society.     

Taking tea with Grandaddy Tough: Accessing the affective topography of logging poetry and labour

In this article I draw upon life history interviews I conducted with retired loggers on the Sechelt Peninsula of British Columbia and published logger poetry to examine the complex embodied and affective relations loggers have with the landscapes they helped shape and the machines and conditions under which they worked. Specifically I examine how the dangers inherent to logging labour are paired with particular affective relations to local landscapes and the machines with which logger's shaped them. I suggest that repetitive explanations offered in logger poetry and the labour history interviews I conducted be examined as something more nuanced, interesting and grounded than mere masculine self-mythologizing. I explore these representations as evidence of an incomplete, melancholic process of mourning for personal and environmental losses sustained in logging labour.     

Life’s frailty – on fundamentalistic bonds in Haneke’s film Amour

My essay is centred upon Michael Haneke’s film Amour (2012), which revolves around the experiences of an 80-year-old musician couple, George and Anne. The relationship is severely tested as a result of Anne suffering a stroke. The director stakes out questions that explore the potential boundaries for our dignity and love. Using vignettes from the film, I will shed light on the manner in which life becomes restricted, as the object of our love vanishes. A central theme of the film is the collapsing of the mourning process that seeks a resolution in the choice between life and death. In the article, I will attempt to explain it in terms of an incorporation of the lost object of love that has as its purpose to preserve this bond, an incorporation that assumes a physical, concrete form characterised by disorientation, as a defence against catastrophic change. The article furthermore touches upon the concept of the third in the sense that Britton uses it, as something that may reconcile and provide meaning, but which in this case has ceased to function as a symbolic glue. An expression of failure in the process of mourning emerges in a form of a distorted neoreality, with confusion and disorientation as ingredients, to avoid the pain of reality.     

Mourning the dead,mourning the disappeared: The enigma of the absent–presence

Freud's interest in the impact of death on the living goes back further than Mourning and Melancholia (1917e, [1915]). In Totem and Taboo (1912–13) Freud noted the ambivalence of the emotions we experience in relation to the dead. In this paper, I focus on Mourning and Melancholia as a landmark in the understanding of both the normal and psychopathological aspects of mourning and depressive processes in human beings. Mourning and Melancholia bridges Freud's first and second topographic theories of the psychic apparatus and constitutes for many authors the foundation of his theory of internal object relations. With this psychoanalytic understanding of mourning as a framework, I discuss ‘special mourning processes,’ such as the those confronted by psychoanalysts in Argentina when treating the relatives of thousands of people who were ‘disappeared’ by the military dictatorship in the 1970s; they are ‘special’ in the sense that the external reality [which] constitutes the starting point of the psychic mourning process, as described by Freud, is absent. I argue that the ‘absent–presence’ of the body as an enigmatic message initiates a special mourning process that bears certain characteristics of, and is isomorphic to, Laplanche's seduction theory.     

Fracturing drive or fracturing connections—relational considerations commentary on paper by Paul Williams

We tend to conceive of mourning primarily in intrapsychic terms. In this commentary I highlight how Harvey Peskin’s paper (this issue) helps us to appreciate that grief is not only the product of the individual mind but is also constituted relationally. Both what we experience in our grieving and how we express it is shaped by and through those around us whose grief we bear witness to, as we ourselves grieve and are witnessed by them.

I elaborate further on Peskin’s view of the role of witnessing during grieving and mine another profound implication in his discourse by pointing to the bidirectional influence between mourning and relationality. Not only is mourning fostered through relational engagement, but our grieving together can provide the mortar for the building and sustaining of community.     

Men,Warriorism, and Mourning: the Development of Unconventional Warriors

In this article, I consider the interrelation between the warrior ethos, warriorism, and mourning. More specifically, the question I seek to answer is how a young man moves from warriorism—an uncritical acceptance of warrior ethos—to being an unconventional warrior who, while remaining attached to the warrior ethos, is critical toward a government that uses its military to further the aims of political and economic elites. I rely on psychology of religion perspectives to understand the warrior ethos and warriorism because they have many parallels to religion. In addition, I find Nathan Carlin’s discussion of religious mourning helpful in framing this process of change. Finally, to illustrate my claims, I discuss the life of Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler.     

Reminiscence,Ritual, and Beyond Working Through: Commentary on Papers by Joyce Slochower and by Laura Impert and Margaret Rubin

The author examines, contextualizes, and elaborates upon Slochower's psychoanalytic exploration of commemorative rituals and, more specifically, the Jewish tradition of Yitzor as well as upon Impert and Rubin's understanding of embodied nostalgic reminiscences, considering them within a therapeutic context for the mourner entering into the clinical situation. Slochower's experience with commemorative rituals as facilitating environments for the restoration or support of potential space and memorial activity suggests that they can aid in the re-construction and re-shaping of emotional memory, going beyond a notion of “working through.” Impert and Rubin suggest that generative nostalgic reminisces, a soma-sensory based form of memory that holds the potential for activating arrested mourning, may be clinically usefully in awakening dormant or dissociated grief so that patients can access mourning. Extending upon these contributions, the author further considers the possibility that mourning might be more usefully conceived as processes of transformational work for which a fixed resolution or outcome is neither proscribed nor prescribed. This transformational work may be seen, in part, as ongoing cycles of self-surrender to the mourner's swirling constructions of attachments lost, re-found, re-remembered, and re-conceived.     

Mourning’s dissonance; who am I who mourns and whom do I mourn?

In this article I explore how a relational psychoanalytic and phenomenological perspective can open out new possibilities for interpretations of experiences of bereavement. I critically discuss Freud’s acclaimed paper, ‘Mourning and melancholia’ in the light of work by philosophers Merleau-Ponty (a phenomenologist) and Judith Butler (a contemporary post-modern feminist philosopher). I reflect on how questions of identity, language, and embodiment, crucial themes in Merleau-Ponty’s and Butler’s theorising of human subjectivities, emerge in two literary/autobiographical accounts of mourning: Nora Webster, by the contemporary Irish writer, Colm Tóibín, and Mourning Diary by the French philosopher, Roland Barthes. Through my discussion of these philosophical and literary texts I argue for a psychoanalytic perspective which is attuned to the conscious and unconscious subtleties and complexities of mourning and engages with the ways in which the identities of the mourner and the mourned and the relations between them are, for the mourner, constantly in flux. I emphasize the importance of attending in the psychoanalytic relationship to the specificity and uniqueness of individuals’ languages of mourning and to the effects on experiences of bereavement of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and physical ability within particular socio-historical and cultural contexts.     

Mourning is a family affair

Mourning is a process of social disengagement. In our modern society, however, the influence of social and religious institutions on the process of mourning has significantly diminished and been partially replaced by mental health clinics. Given the latter's penchant for the intrapsychic view, the perspective on mourning has become reduced to the individual. These trends are clearly reflected in a review of current literature and research on mourning. This paper proposes an interactional, systemic view of mourning through the analysis of two different families. Findings indicate that despite contextual differences between these two families, some basic commonalities render generalizations possible: (a) The selection of the identified patient is not coincidental to the stage of the family life cycle and to the role of the deceased member in the system. (b) Although death affects each individual differently, depending upon his or her relationship with the deceased, it continues to influence all family relations with equal powers. (c) Nonresolution of mourning permits a ghost to become an integral member of the family system. Examination of the treatment process demonstrates that a systemic approach is effective, even when individuals are interviewed alone.     

The missing tombstone: reflections on mourning and creativity

There are differences as well as similarities between mourning occurring after the loss of a single individual under ordinary civilized conditions, and mourning after multiple losses under traumatic conditions. A brief review of the psychoanalytic theory of mourning articulated by Freud in 1917 and modified in the 1960s is followed by an equally brief review of the relationship between artistic creativity and mourning. Because survivors of major disasters who suffer multiple losses need time to recover before they can engage the emotionally demanding task of mourning, the mourning process in these cases is frequently delayed. "Memorial spaces" appear to facilitate delayed mourning because such spaces are responsive to a deeply felt need by survivors of major tragedies to articulate what they experience as unspeakable and unshareable. The memories and the pain associated with them are then welcome because mourning is not about forgetting; mourning is about remembering, a process that may take a lifetime.     

MOURNING IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC SITUATION AND IN SHAKESPEARE'S THE TEMPEST

Recognizing that mourning builds psychic structure, the author highlights the ubiquitous and essential nature of mourning in the psychoanalytic situation. Reality testing is intimately connected to mourning and is the warp on which psychic structure is woven in the analytic situation. Reality testing necessarily involves opportunities for mourning and thus will be present in every analytic hour. The confrontation with reality is the basis for all processes of mourning, or for creating defenses against this painful experience. The author views mourning as fundamentally a transformational process, and Shakespeare's The Tempest is used to illustrate this aspect of mourning.     

I Have Loved: Reply to Commentaries

In replying I explore in more depth the journey of reclaiming the lost love and the mourning of a relationship that could not be publicly or privately grieved. Disavowed love, in its melancholic haunting, compels identity. In agreement with the model of multiplicity proposed by Harris and Hill I delve further into our hybridic racialized identities. I also come to an understanding of our differences, including our experience of whiteness and our processes of racialization. Finally, I engage with the complex issues of anger and forgiveness.     

Mourning the Loss of the Idealized Self: A Transsexual Passage

Abstract

The few published psychoanalytic writings that exist regarding transsexual men and women tend to focus on the etiology of their gender identities and almost invariably define these patients as inherently pathological. Such myopic viewpoints leave no room for analysis and discussion of the transsexual patient's normal developmental process. In this paper, I use a Kleinian framework to depathologize the coping strategies employed by transsexual patients and to illustrate the importance of mourning in the development of a positive transsexual identity. A clinician who is able to sit comfortably with contradiction may facilitate the transsexual patient's mourning process—saying goodbye to the persecutory object of the past and letting go of the idealized image of the future.     

Incompatible identities: Memory and experience at the National September 9/11 Memorial and Museum

The National September 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City is simultaneously a secular location and sacred place, a space for collective mourning and for individual grief. The incised identities of the diasporic 9/11 dead are displaced from loved ones and from traditional resting places for the dead. While the ephemeral presence of the deceased on the memorial site may be tangible to some, the dead will soon return to this site in the physical form of bone fragments and unidentifiable remains. What will this place then become – public place or death space, ossuary or park, or simultaneously a heterotopic realm of incompatible identities and multiple experiences? The writer's voice echoes these heterotopic tensions; the presence of the subjective voice struggles with the vividness of a ‘prosthetic’ attachment to the events of 9/11 and the scholarly voice struggles to attain a critical distance from the event. From these seemingly incompatible perspectives, a middle ground is negotiated by embedding an autoethnographical perspective, allowing for reflection upon the implications of the return of the dead to the heart of the living city upon practices of death and grief, of memory and experience, of mourning and of everyday life.     

Role of psychocultural factors in the adjustment of Soviet Jewish refugees: Applying Kleinian theory of mourning

The purpose of this paper is to show how failures of adjustment of Soviet refugees to America are to a great degree determined by their difficulties in mourning. The author argues that due to such difficulties, Soviet refugees may get fixated sometimes for long periods of time at different stages of the mourning process. Such fixations may be the causes for peculiar types of behavior, frequently exhibited by these refugees in America and attributed by various authors to their psychocultural characteristics. Melanie Klein's analysis of mourning and its relationship to manic depressive states is applied to understand the mourning process in this population. The author shows that difficulties in the mourning process experienced by Soviet refugees may be connected with the culturally acquired inhibitions of mourning. Such inhibitions are analyzed from a family, historical and cultural perspective.     

Working with psychosis Part 4: Therapy online – ending by email

This is the fourth and concluding paper from a series about psychotherapy with a man suffering from a psychotic illness. The paper describes the ending of the therapy which was precipitated by my decision to leave the country. News of ending was extremely disturbing for my client and stirred fears that he would again break down and need re-admission to hospital. Six weeks before the ending he stopped attending but continued to stay in contact by email. I decided to reply to his emails during the session times, and we developed what he came to call his ‘email therapy’. This online technology provided a means for my client and me to separate, to find a third perspective and to begin to mourn this ending without him losing his mind and breaking down. Following James Fisher's ideas about ‘mourning in the presence of the loved object’ I understand aspects of this email ending as enabling a relinquishing of projective identification used to possess and control, a recognition of the freedom of the other and of the need to mourn omnipotence. I discuss some of the problems presented by premature ending with a vulnerable client – problems which can be seen in my difficulty of mourning and working through the ending reflected in the long time it has taken to finish writing this paper.     

Mourning beyond melancholia: Freud's psychoanalysis of loss

Freud's mourning theory has been criticized for assuming a model of subjectivity based on a strongly bounded form of individuation. This model informs "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), in which Freud argued that mourning comes to a decisive end when the subject severs its emotional attachment to the lost one and reinvests the free libido in a new object. Yet Freud revised his mourning theory in writings concerned with the Great War and in The Ego and the Id (1923), where he redefined the identification process previously associated with melancholia as an integral component of mourning. By viewing the character of the ego as an elegiac formation, that is, as "a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes," Freud's later work registers the endlessness of normal grieving; however, it also imports into mourning the violent characteristics of melancholia, the internal acts of moralized aggression waged in an effort to dissolve the internal trace of the other and establish an autonomous identity. Because it is not immediately clear how Freud's text offers a theory of mourning beyond melancholy violence, his account of the elegiac ego is shown here to ultimately undermine the wish for an identity unencumbered by the claims of the lost other and the past, and to suggest the affirmative and ethical aspects of mourning.     

Reflections on <Emphasis Type="Italic">Mourning Religion</Emphasis>: A Response to the Respondents

This article is a response to the Mourning Religion review essays published in this forum. Specifically, it addresses the respondents’ concerns as they impact three related areas: the relationship between mourning and religion, mourning and melancholia, and mourning and the religious intellectual.     

The Man Who Could Not Cry and the Psychoanalyst Who Could: Mutual Healing in the Maternal Transference/Countertransference

This is a clinical/theoretical study of mutual healing in the maternal transference/countertransference. Therapist and patient began their work when each was in extreme mourning. I detail sensory, affective transactions between them that proved transformative. I deem these basic to the healing that was unusually rapid. It broke through the patient's dissociation, and the therapist's sorrow. I note that the treatment modalities were similar to those essential to mother/infant bonding. I connect the treatment's transformative effects with those discovered through infant research and studies with the functioning magnetic resonance imagery test (fMRI). All three of these modes of interpersonal study-psychotherapy, infant, and fMRI research-exhibit mind/body imprinting of the mother/infant deeply connected experience.